The Death of Virginia
Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760-1832) · 1828
In the Roman Forum a father has just killed his own daughter. Virginius, a plebeian centurion, has stabbed Virginia to save her from the decemvir Appius Claudius, who had claimed her as a slave in order to possess her. The girl collapses at the centre of the canvas while the crowd recoils in horror and the tyrant on his tribunal gestures in vain. The composition spreads nearly eight metres wide, with temples closing the background and the Roman crowd arranged in groups of anger, grief and fear.
The story, told by Livy, ends with the uprising that overthrew the decemvirs, and it was a favourite of the revolutionary generation as a lesson in liberty and civic virtue. Guillon-Lethière, born in Guadeloupe in seventeen sixty and a former director of the French Academy in Rome, finished the canvas in eighteen twenty eight, signing and dating it at the bottom, and showed it at the Salon of eighteen thirty one. It was given to the museum by a Monsieur Boyard and formally accepted in eighteen forty eight. Together with his earlier Brutus Condemning His Sons to Death, also in the Louvre, it makes the painter's political creed visible on a monumental scale.
Did You Know? Lethière, born in Guadeloupe to a French official and a woman of African descent, rose to direct the French Academy in Rome, and this vast Roman scene was the last great picture of his career.
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